Author

Abstract

We estimate the costs of occupational mobility using a novel approach that relies on aggregate flows of workers across occupations rather than on wage data. The theoretical underpinnings for this approach are derived from a model of occupation choice that delivers a gravity equation linking worker flows to occupation characteristics and to transition costs, which we proxy using task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). Occupation flow data are constructed from the matched monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) between 1994 and 2012. We nd that transition costs vary widely across occupations, are increasing in task distance (the dissimilarity in the mix of tasks performed in the two occupations) and are higher for transitions across broad task categories. However, most of the transition costs are accounted for by general, task-independent entry costs, speci c to each destination occupation.

NEP fields

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2014-015. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.